The term romance (Spanish: romance/romanza, Italian: romanza, German: Romanze, French: romance, Russian: романс, Portuguese: romance, Romanian: romanţă) has a centuries-long history. Applied to narrative ballads in Spain, it came to be used by the 18th century for simple lyrical pieces not only for voice, but also for instruments alone. The Oxford Dictionary of Music[1] states that "generally it implies a specially personal or tender quality".

So many composers in the French tradition wrote Romances sans paroles, "Romances without words", from the 1840s onwards[2] that the radical poet Paul Verlaine in turn published a collection of his impressionistic poems as Romances sans paroles (1874).